Do you know what I mean?

I wasn’t sure when this essay would ever see the light of day, or the blank page of a Microsoft word document. I think in part because I was afraid to talk about this sort of thing without muddying it up or creating greater confusion. Before I dive into this essay, I want to draw quick attention the overlap between what I will talk about and it’s inevitable connection to organized faith systems and the acknowledgement that these perspectives can inform organized religion but also transcend them. I will be diving into topics of the sacred, and the sacred is a characteristic of human experience, and is not exclusive to the structures and institutions that hold a tremendous amount of power in our world, and which don’t always use that power responsibly. With that said, I want to talk about something called ritual.

When I first thought to write this essay, it was because I had noticed in myself, a need to unite my daily life with a higher sense of purpose. I don’t mean to say that I was looking for some greater meaning in my life, but that my actions were consistently without cause, and it made me feel hollow. I was, and am usually, living on autopilot. I’m checking boxes, fulfilling the needs of the day, sleeping, and starting over again. The monotony is dangerous for most, and it’s something I need to work on changing.

So, this idea of ritual crawled into my brain as I began making small steps to better my daily experiences, all of which seemed to rest on this idea of building intentional pockets of difference in the otherwise repetitive structure of my weeks. It could be lighting a candle, drinking a good cup of coffee, or resisting my consistent drive to go hermit-mode. Either way, intentional.

At first, I began my reflection on ritual in a broad sense. I recognized this connection between action and intention and began incorporating small ways of taking small amounts of control over the things I didn’t have really any control over. If I am to work in the same place every day, at least I can make this space special, or beautiful, or however I need it to be. The same is true in my personal life. If I am to support myself through daily monotony, I need to find ways to honour my life meaningfully.

That is where I started. This intention is important, but it’s not the whole thing. So, I want to really define ritual for you.

Ritual, at first glance, is a behaviour found cross-culturally and therefore serves in defining what it means to be human, or to define the experience of being as we are. Primarily, we use this word to define behaviours in religious contexts that involve ceremony, life transition, and connection with a sense of divinity (Joas, 2021). In short, these sets of actions or behaviours have both primary purposes of acting through the process/set of behaviours but also secondary purposes of fulfilling a religious or dogmatic need.

This sort of conflicts with the layman’s understanding of ritual as we describe our morning or evening rituals with one another. Perceivably, we don’t have this sacred component to infuse, which is why the term has long since expanded to the broad definition of meaningful actions. We have broad definitions for human phenomenon such as this because there are so many iterations that cannot be addressed otherwise. Basically, we’re complex.

So, then ritual as meaningful action needs to be sifted out further. We have tons of meaningful actions and they do not necessarily fall under what would otherwise be considered ritual. For example, there are these moments of actions that I intend to do that are habitual, such as letting my dog out to pee or commuting to work. I must do these things; I acknowledge the importance of these actions in maintaining my life and act accordingly. But are they ritualistic?

When we confuse intention and presence, we fail to recognize that these are not mutually exclusive nor are they exhaustive. Intention can be fruitful in completing actions, but we can do so without full attention. Presence can be obtained without objective, though it is helpful in infusing our behaviour with intent. Why am I saying all of this? Well, on my path to building more meaningful experiences in my life I fell into the trap of thinking that routine was the same as ritual, and I began to behave repetitively. Don’t get me wrong, a lesson in discipline is sometimes necessary, but I was looking for a deeper well of meaning than what accomplishing tasks could grant me.

So, what the fuck? I ask myself, and imagine you are asking now. Where do we end up? Well, I think I’ve found my way to ritual by sifting through intention and presence and action and wound up in this momentary revelation of what ritual truly strives for: rituals aim to make experience meaningful. That’s it. That was my eureka moment. Rituals use behaviours or actions which are symbolic of deeper meanings so that we may experience, even just momentarily, that meaning on a real, lived and visceral level.

If I ask myself what the goal of my rituals are, what they mean, or what they hope to mean, I perhaps have a chance of moving these behaviours to this sacred state. If my goal of a morning coffee is to seek a moment of enjoyment, I must utilize both action in making the coffee, intention in its brew, and presence in my consumption. I have to know that this moment is to be enjoyed. It's purpose has to rest there and I must use these tools to build a moment segmented from my ordinary life. 

Now, this is a more secular sense of the term ritual, but it is important to note in that we have this sort of capacity to build experiences so long as we know what they are for. Luckily, we get to decide. I will, however, bring it further to connect with the sense of sacred.

Both Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade defined confronting the sacred as a sensation of awe, mystery and fascination. I typically like to fixate on that first sense of awe, as I believe the perception of beauty has a particular capacity for welcoming this intense and concentrated feeling of wider connection. He believed that it is such a human thing to do that Eliade frequently used the term Homo religiosus to define humans as ‘religious man’. In this way, Eliade is highlighting his belief of an innate drive to experience the sacred.

Eliade (1949) is well-known in religious studies for the shift in terminology from sacred experience as Theophany, or the meeting of God/deity, to Hierophany, the manifestation of the sacred. Perhaps in some ways dissecting the human experience from the very literal suggestion that sacred experiences are rooted in the encountering of divine beings.

So, in discussing the sacred component of ritual I think it is important to look briefly to the work of David Hume who believed organized religion emerged out of the repeated individual experiences of humans inclined toward religious experiences (Joas, 2021). William James similarly defined religion as a private experience, citing that the sacred was encountered in moments of solitude so long as the experiencer was willing to engage with what they viewed as divine (Joas, 2021). Perhaps ritual, in this sense could include these moments in our lives where we infuse our actions with greater meaning, and that we experience intimately as we engage within our inner worlds.

The individual aspect to ritual is worthy of note as it is the site of experience and our lived capacity for encountering the desirable feelings that we called sacred. It is in this way we experience the same awe in our reception of art, music and poetry. Ronald L. Grimes (2000) suggested that daily rituals such as mediation are a response to recurring needs, much like the maintenance of faith, joy and meaning. It is the way we as people become activated by life and fed by it.

So, this is really where I wanted us to end up, because in all of this reflection I became very concerned again with the practical applications of this. How do I begin to curate sets of actions in my life that bring about deeper meaning? Well, I think in part, I sat with this realization that ritual and meaning are experienced with revitalizing properties and that perhaps rituals are just another way of nurturing ourselves.

So, ritual then has this large overlap with commonly held beliefs about love. Erich Fromm (1956) defined love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.". bell hooks (1999) in her book All About Love, expands on Fromm’s definition and states "Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action.”. This reframing of love then, as bell hooks suggests, parses love from feeling and behaviour. It grants us accountability over love (hooks, 1999). The feeling we associate with love only goes as far as it is used.

Then at the individual level, we look at ritual as a very real act of love in that it is a behaviour we extend ourselves through and nurture ourselves with. We can then use our morning cup of coffee to sit and decide to perform this type of love, this moment of awe, the momentary act of care that is for us to enjoy, and thoroughly at that.

So then I look at my life and I can say these routines I’ve implemented must, at their very root, be based in love, for myself and my goals and only then can they possess meaning that is significant both in the moment of experience and beyond. It is in this way that our acts of self-care become meaningful and progressive.

It would however, be irresponsible to leave ritual at this individual level as love is a behaviour that can also be made sacred in the presence of community. It was Emile Durkheim, a Functionalist sociologist sometimes touted as a founder of the discipline among Karl Marx and Max Weber, who believed ritual at it’s very root could only exist as a collective. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim (1912) notes that religion must be viewed as a collective experience, polarizing with the aforementioned scholars who emphasize the individual.

So when we look to introduce meaning into our lives we should probably look somewhere in the middle, noting that our capacity to nurture the wellbeing of ourselves and our communities has this perceivably sacred component. That when we engage meaningfully with the world, when we encounter our daily lives and our milestones, we can do so with the presence, intention and action necessary to feel this rootedness in love.

It is C.S. Lewis (1960) who identified four types of love one of which being Agape. In Christianity this love is associated with love of the divine or God, but is truly introduced in his works as a love with no expectation of return. This is what he calls charity, and which he identifies as a type of love that has the capacity to improve our affectionate, romantic, and platonic love (Lewis, 1960). It is love with the intention of better loving.

At the end of the day, I think most of our lives can be improved by seeking this sense of better loving, of including the act of love in our lives. When I started this goal of bringing meaning into the monotony of my current life, I never assumed that what I needed to do was orient the changes I was making with this sense of love. Cleaning my space because having a clean space is nice to have, taking care of my skin because doing so feels good. Knowing that these behaviours result in bettering my wellbeing and therefore building my capacity to love others better. In that way, it is the same for our meaningful engagement with our communities, the people in our lives who deserve kindness and respect. Our pets who deserve a fulfilling yet far too short life. Our neighbours who live parallel yet equally rich lives. Same is true of the folks we’ll never meet at all.

I want to conclude this essay in the only way I know how which is to say that our lives can be made meaningful through this belief that doing so betters our lives and other's lives too. We can incorporate simple acts, moments of intentional action that are meant to nurture ourselves and others. We can begin to explore the minute yet significant ways of bettering the experiences we have by better tending to our worlds in each of their extensions. It means showing up, and it is incredibly active, which also means it is incredibly brave.

For me, it meant writing this, and once again risking embarrassing myself in writing and sharing these thoughts, feelings and experiences of mine that I was resistant to doing again, despite having done it a dozen or so times now. It means being an active force in my life, taking accountability for how I show up for myself and others. It means active loving, it means learning and listening and ritual can be all these things so long as they align with the greater aim of deepening connections, nurturing, and opening ourselves to the opportunities only ritual can provide. With all of that, the sacred is actually quite available to us, and we have this wonderful, and uniquely human gift of conjuring it.

 

Durkheim, E., Cosman, C., & Cladis, M. S. (1912). The elementary forms of religious life. Oxford University Press.

Eliade, M. (1949). Patterns in comparative religion. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press.

Fromm, E., Funk, R., & Pauck, M. H. (1956). The art of loving. Harper Perennial.

Grimes, R. L. (2000). Deeply into the Bone. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520929630

hooks, b. (1999). All about love. William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Joas, H. (2022). The power of the sacred: An alternative to the narrative of disenchantment. Oxford University Press.